Build a new scene

In this topic

Scenes are the document used for persistence and sharing of 3D content on the ArcGIS platform. To learn about opening scenes from ArcGIS Online and Portal, see Display a scene. This guide describes how to create a new scene programmatically, add content, and show the scene in your app.

The data you visualize in your 3D app is defined by the scene class. The types of data you can display in a scene include:

Basemaps, which can be draped over surface layers. A surface layer contains elevation information. Other layer types can also be used as a basemap; there are no special restrictions for basemaps in scenes.

Operational layers, which can include feature layers or scene layers. Scene layers represent built and natural 3D content such as buildings, trees, valleys, and mountains and can be accessed as scene services or local scene layer packages.

Surface layers, which define the elevation information of the 3D visualization. A surface layer can come in many forms, for example, local raster data such as a DEM or DTED or from an ArcGIS image service.

Now you have a new camera you can apply to your scene view. You can apply it immediately using
setViewpointCamera as shown in the code below, or the camera can be animated to the new position using one of the asynchronous methods.

self.sceneView.setViewpointCamera(snowdonCamera)

Create a scene layer package and local elevation source

ArcGIS Pro allows you to
create a scene layer package using a geoprocessing tool. You can add this local scene layer package (
.slpk) as a scene layer (
AGSArcGISSceneLayer) to your ArcGIS Runtime app and add it to a
AGSScene. To display the scene layer package, create a new scene layer with a URL pointing to a local scene layer package.

To take this scene layer offline your app can define an elevation surface by consuming local raster datasets on the client. The following formats are supported for creating a local elevation source: